Anthropic downloaded over 7M pirated books to train Claude, a judge said
Anthropic cut up millions of used books to train Claude — and downloaded over 7 million pirated ones too, a judge said
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This is functionally a power grab to control and monopolize AI by making the AI models impossible to create with open source.
When AI models become better, the value of labor becomes less and less worth. And when AI models are controlled through copyright we can't even open source AI locally to escape this. Because open source can't afford the data needed to train them.
What? No, this is just basic common sense law being applied as one would expect. They literally pirated shitloads of books via torrent. That's open and shut infringement and always has been. This doesn't apply to scraped text data you're licensed to access, or purchased books they digitized or purchased in digital form. It just finds that, no, you cannot torrent without license volumes and volumes of copyright protected material, even if your eventual user of it may be otherwise treated as fair use (or, imo, not at all infringing).
Laws are just rules rich people have paid for. At least most of the laws. This concerns how the future of our society looks like.
And no, this hasn't always been like this. "Intellectual property" has only been a thing for the last 70 years or so.
This...is an example of laws actually being applied to a wealthy corporate actor exactly as they are and have been applied to random ass individuals? What are you talking about.
Also, patents literally predate the US' founding, and copyright is hundreds of years old, moreover IP rights are enshrined in the constitution. Again, like, what???
Yeah look I don't care about the details. Copyright laws have been gradually expanded over the decades. I consider copyright law fundamentally unethical and a kind of theft, or artificial scarcity. Oppressive IP laws are basically the only universal laws in all countries, which is disgusting if you compare it to basic human rights. And patents right now in times of climate change are increasing the risk of genocide and our own extinction by slowing down innovation and adaptation by rising costs and red tape. I really don't care about debating this, take it or leave it lol.
Just understand that with this, IP law has grown and AI models have become property that have to be licensed to be used. That means those with the most money will control the use and who benefits from them. In 10 or 20 years AI models will have become much better and replace a foundation of how our civilization works - survival in exchange for your labour.
Because with each improvement of AI and automation, a larger segment of the population won't have the ability to develop skills to compete. They will be cut off from being able to earn money. This percentage of the population will increase until at one point, AI and robots will do all the work that 90% of the population will be able to do, just faster and cheaper and better. However far away that point is, we'll move step by step towards that point.
Are we moving towards an Utopia or a Dystopia? Being able to build a robot that builds another robot that does work to help you survive, grow food, build housing etc could in a way democratize economy. But the principle that AI is owned by some few plutocrats based on some IP law because of whatever... that will keep. You'll have to pay monthly for the privilege to use an open source AI model locally, forever. Technology won't free us, but make us more and more subordinate to those who own the "IP".
All this anti-AI propaganda about copyright and how AI "stole" some poor artists work - it is all for this. To make people fall for the trap that naturally, AI models are owned by those who own the data. The posts on social media, the books and media conglomerates, the science papers, the news articles. They own it all, and this only serves them, not us.
So I really don't care about the legal ideas that were formed when the world looked completely different and have been distorted to become a kind of feudal ownership of our collective knowledge and future. Laws are simply an expression of who has power.